by Sarah Outen
So instead of revising for my exams in the summer half term of 2003, I joined a little expedition up in the Hebrides, the rugged islands off the west coast of Scotland. I was charmed by the spirit of the place, the raw untamed energy that showed itself when a storm burst out of a calm seascape and rattled through a camp in moments. At the other extreme, I also loved the still nights, and spent a couple of them under the stars, sleeping on the beach for the first time in my life. I remember one night bedding down in my sleeping bag as waves tickled the shore nearby and lulled me to sleep. Waking up to see the stars stretched right across the sky was a gorgeous, breathtaking moment, especially as it meant I could wriggle down into my bag again and sleep some more. The next morning, as the grapefruit sky roused the oystercatchers, my friend tried to do the same to me. I opened one eye and saw the sea lapping at my sleeping bag, the kayaks already floating and tugging at their lines; we were about to be stranded on an uninhabited island. I’m glad she woke me up.
As well as admiring the beauty of these places, I also came to understand that I loved being the engine that took me there, creating the force behind the speed, or at least in control of it. To use my own wit and muscle to journey from A to B was so simple and satisfying; that’s why rowing captured my imagination after watching Sir Steve Redgrave and his crew on TV racing to gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. They were so skilful, so powerful and the whole thing so spine-tinglingly alluring that I decided that I wanted to row and race one day. I had also been inspired by seeing Dame Ellen MacArthur shaking up the sailing world with great results in the Vendée Globe in 2001 – as a young woman making a name for herself in the medal positions in this male-dominated sport, it made me think that one day I would like to go to sea too. I say one day as there was nowhere to row in Rutland. As I was already super busy with other stuff, I put these ideas on my list of things to do another day and I planned to start rowing when I headed off to university.
A teacher suggested I was capable of winning a place at Oxford and I figured that if anyone knew how to row it would be those folks in dark blue, their famous crew colours. All my university choices were based on whether I would be able to row, shortly after whether I could study biology – sadly none offered joint honours in the two. With no idea how to choose which one of the thirty-something Oxford colleges to apply to, I based my choice on the pictures in the brochure, which showed Worcester College had its own lake and a boathouse on the river. The interview at Worcester terrified and confused me – partly because one of the interviewers was Chinese and I didn’t understand what she was saying and partly because I felt way out my depth. I also decided at this time that I didn’t like the silly rule about not walking on the grass in the quad. Why plant grass that you can’t walk on? A second interview at Hertford College was less terrifying and actually good fun, mostly because the tutor handed me a live grasshopper and asked me to talk about it – which was much less daunting than the confusing stuff I had been challenged with at Worcester. I left Oxford 103 per cent certain that I wouldn’t be going there, but feeling like I had redeemed myself with some sensible and cogent grasshopper comments. Either way, I was fully prepared for the rejection letter from Worcester which I received a little white later and not too bothered by the bit that said I had been ‘pooled’, which effectively meant that I might be offered a place at a different college if another had space.
I put it out of my head and thought nothing more of it until a few days later I took a call from Dr Iles, Biology Fellow of St Hugh’s College, asking me if I would like to come and study there instead. Apparently Worcester had been impressed by my interview but hadn’t had space for me, so the place at Hugh’s was mine if I wanted it. I paused, nibbling my lip and twirling the phone cord round my thumb. Then very calmly I said I would need to consider and visit to see if I liked the college. Idiot child! Who in their right mind says they will sit and think about an offer from Oxford, one of the world’s leading centres of thinking, research and, importantly, a flippin’ good place to row? Muppet Outen. Anyway, I did visit and I liked what I saw. Importantly, the Hughsie gardens were there to be walked on, sat on, played on and generally enjoyed, so I accepted the offer and set about nailing the A levels I would still need. There was real danger of only scooping a B in chemistry and I needed straight A grades.
About this time I failed my driving test, twice. It was the first thing in my life which I had outright flunked and it stung, both times, but it was one of the best lessons I have ever learned. After the first time I rang Dad, angry and upset, to be told that he didn’t think I had been ready for it in the first place. I was amazed and pissed off; why the hell hadn’t he said anything beforehand? Quietly he said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t have listened anyway.’ That hurt even more than failing, and mostly because it was absolutely true. So once I had dusted myself off and acknowledged that he was right, I realised that failure can be a positive thing – a chance for another shot, a clean canvas to walk out in the right direction.
Spring came and so did my third and final driving test. I passed and turned my attention to the exams as summer arrived, bringing the grades I had worked so hard for and a ticket to Oxford – I was en route to a rowing boat at last.
Chapter 3
An Ocean to Row
‘Dream as if you’ll live forever; live as if you’ll die today’
James Dean
Before university I took a gap year, doing a succession of mostly unexciting jobs before heading to Mexico for three months in search of adventure and some experience in nature conservation. I got both, by volunteering on a sea turtle conservation camp and then backpacking round the country, doing all the things young travellers do.
A few months before I went off travelling I visited my doctor, because my normally compliant eczema had rumbled up with a vengeance and I had found a bald patch on the back of my head. Blood tests diagnosed autoimmune hypothyroidism. This translates to my immune system rather stupidly and very unhelpfully breaking down a very important hormone, which in turn leaves me with the metabolism (and figure) of a tired slug. It also means sporadic bouts of crazed eczema, occasionally kamikaze hair and a lifelong ticket to daily tablets (‘Slug Pellets’) to kick-start my metabolism. Annoyingly, it also meant that my medical rating for the army was immediately downgraded, scratching my plans to fly helicopters after university. I was an Army Scholar, being sponsored through my final years of education with a commitment to at least a three-year commission after university, so a lot of my future hopes rested on this; I would now have to think of something else – still in the army, just on the ground instead of in the air.
October 2004 heralded the start of a new era for me – Oxford exploded onto the scene and I jumped in a boat as soon as I possibly could. Unfortunately, I also made the mistake of getting back into hockey and joining the university team. If you have ever heard a ligament snap, you will know that it is generally followed by a stomach turning scream. Four weeks into my first term, I heard one of the cruciate ligaments in my knee resign with a snap during a hockey match. It was the result of nothing at all heroic or skilful, just a case of turning too quickly and sharply so that all the fibres tore with a ping, sending bone crashing into bone as my knee dislocated. Not only did it put me on crutches for the rest of term but it also took me off the water and out of the rowing boats and meant that I bowed out from my Army Scholarship – none of which had been in my original game plan. My goal had been to trial with the University Blues Rowing Squad in my second year but now that was off the cards too.
By the end of the first term in my second year, my knee was fixed and I felt truly happy. I had a lovely crowd of new friends including Alex, my boyfriend, and I found the biology course challenging and interesting. I loved everything about the rowing now that I was back in a boat: the team spirit, the training, being out on the river in the morning mist and the technical demands of learning a new sport. I was proud to be appointed captain of my college crew and had high hopes f
or the year ahead.
It was during that same year that I first heard about ocean rowing, with the arrival of an email while I sat at my desk procrastinating and dreaming of Mars bars and rowing training. Captivated by the idea and now with no plans for after university, I started to look into it and soon decided that I wanted to attempt an ocean one day. The question of which ocean was easily solved. The Indian was more tempting than the Atlantic, which had been rowed by a couple of hundred people and was therefore a relative motorway, mostly because there are organised biannual races across it and a comparatively nice set of trade winds offering routes into the Caribbean. The Pacific is so huge that I didn’t even consider it and the Southern Ocean, being in fact part of the other oceans and such a very crazy place and not at all rowed before, didn’t warrant discussing either: an unforgiving environment so close to Antarctica didn’t seem like a good place to start. So I set my sights on the Indian. It had been attempted very few times with even fewer successes and only a couple of men had made successful solo crossings, no woman ever having tried it at all, in a team or alone. To me, this was not an obvious ticket for failure, as some folk tried to have me believe. I considered it pioneering and exciting. I had no experience or credentials to suggest that I could even row any ocean, but I had a belief that if other people had rowed oceans then so could I. Clearly it wasn’t rocket science – you just needed to prepare well, be driven and focused and hope for a good dollop of luck and keep on rowing until you got to the other side. Given that this was a remote adventure sport in which I had no experience whatsoever, right from the start I thought I should take a team along with me. I asked family and friends, and one after another they all said ‘no’, apparently not very keen on the idea at all. In fact one of my very best friends, Roostie, ignored my messages completely in the hope that she could put me off by not answering. Undeterred, I looked within the university; surely Oxford had folks who wanted to row an ocean? Yes, they did. I put the idea out across various channels within the university, sending emails to different clubs and societies, standing up at various meetings to announce my plans and doing my best to sound as knowledgeable as possible in the face of questioning. At the meetings there were usually a few giggles and gasps as my call for rowers was received and digested, and one tutor sent an email which simply said ‘Are you completely mad?’ Nonetheless, I received a bundle of positive applicants wanting to join my crew. Meanwhile, my parents kept surprisingly silent, clearly hoping that I would lose interest. Instead, I continued to feed them nuggets about the latest ocean-rowing veteran to advise me, and within a few months it dawned on them that I was serious. I spent hours trawling the Internet and making notes, reading books of historic rows and picking the brains of veterans. Mum still tried not to mention it at all but Dad quizzed me, testing my thinking and trying to see what I could see in my head. Even I didn’t know all the details at that stage but I was fixed on the goal and had my sights set on the Indian Ocean for 2009, three years away: I still had my degree to finish after all. Then there was the huge matter of a team, a lot of money, a boat, a plan and some training – all in all it would be a monster effort on all fronts, logistically, financially, emotionally and practically. But it all excited me and so I didn’t mind one bit. Call me naive, but that’s how it was.
Considering that I was supra-happy and not at all stressed at this point, I was surprised when my hair started to fall out. I had had little patches of alopecia at various stages before, but this time I clocked nearly 40 per cent hair loss. When my doctor had nothing very helpful to say I looked for my own solution, soon deciding to shave it all off. My reasoning was easy; I wasn’t ill and I would rather have no hair at all than hair which jumped out of its own accord, leaving handfuls on my pillow or disappearing down the plughole in the shower. Dad, on the other hand, was in more pain than I could ever contemplate and I found that always helped me with perspective: this was small fry. And so one afternoon before a rowing session at the start of the summer term, a friend chopped and shaved my hair for me. After a nervous half hour before I summoned up the courage to leave the room, I embraced the Baldilocks era with enthusiasm. I was in control again, if a little chilly. If my remaining follicles abandoned me even further then it wouldn’t bother me too much, though my boyfriend Alex and my parents found it harder to deal with. My only qualm was that I had to shave the fuzzy regrowth every few days to stop myself from looking like an unkempt doormat. What really surprised me was the assumption from strangers, accompanied by sympathetic noises, that I was having chemotherapy. To those who knew me, I was as healthy as ever: my shark project for the summer vacation was all lined up, Alex and I were madly in love, my rowing was going really well and I planned to trial for the Blues Squad in my final year. The energy and adrenaline of an Oxford life was exciting and addictive, meaning that I worked and played (and rowed and rowed and rowed) really hard. I was just a normal, happy student doing all the normal, happy things that students do.
In May my parents came down and took Alex and me out for lunch to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. I had a rowing test that afternoon so it wasn’t ideal timing, but our schedules were tight. We met the car as it pulled up outside college and Mum got out and held me tight for one of those hugs that only mums know how to give, then got the wheelchair out of the car for Dad and helped him in. It still surprised me to see him in his chair – once a towering six foot, he was now shorter than Mum who is only a couple of inches into the five foot club. As she pushed him down the corridor, questions flying between us at one hundred miles an hour. I smiled, very pleased to see them again. Dad was on good form and full of banter, despite the brutal scaffolding round his leg which had been wired up in some major operations eight weeks earlier. Surgeons had fused his disintegrated ankle joint with a bone graft and lots of screws, in the hope that it would bring some relief from pain and allow him to walk again. I was surprised at how bouncy he seemed, although I noticed he looked older and perhaps a bit ashen. After lunch I cycled along as fast as I could pedal, grinning and singing to myself; I was at one with the world and still too stuffed to appreciate the difficulty of a 2-kilometre sprint test on three full courses and a splash or three of delicious wine.
On the first page of my new journal that week, I declared 2006 the best year of my life; these were good times.
Chapter 4
And They All Fall Down
‘Sorrow comes to all... Perfect relief is not possible, except with time’
Abraham Lincoln
Rowers love lie-ins more than most people because training usually happens pre-dawn, when only the birds are supposed to be awake and the world is still content to be in bed. On the morning of 13 June 2006, sunlight streamed through my window, dappling my bed with soft gold and waking me up. I was due to race at the prestigious Henley Regatta in a few days with the Oxford squad, so I rolled over and fell back asleep, leaving birds and sunlight to do their thing.
Just after seven, someone hammered on my door, shouting for Alex. He got up and went out in his stripy pyjamas and I returned to my snoozing. A little while later he came back in and sat on the bed beside me. I sat up half-heartedly, pretending to be curious. He was pale and clammy and looked as though someone had just died.
Someone had. It was my Dad.
I didn’t believe him. Dad was OK. Mum had said he was getting better. No, not my Dad. No, no, no, no, NO! Not my Dad. No. I choked with shock, tears cutting down my face and pain raging inside me as I collapsed into a shivering wreck. I screamed and screamed a sound so hollow and alien that it scared me. The whole concept scared me. My Dad was dead. No more. Gone forever. I didn’t understand any of it. I cried and cried into the bed sheets, clutching fists of duvet and thumping the bed. My world had just been broken. I was broken. Utterly and completely destroyed; this felt catastrophic.
Somehow Alex managed to calm me down enough to hand me a phone to speak to Mum, and we both cried down the line, agreeing that I should come straight home. Al
ex said he would take me back on the train and sort everything out with college. I then walked down the corridor in floods of tears to my best friend Roostie’s door, knocked and stood there for a moment with my face in my hands, crying some more. I looked up into her frightened face as she opened the door and dissolved into her arms, sobbing with my sad new truth. We cried together and she hugged me tightly, before packing me off to the shower and promising to make me some breakfast.
In the shower the tears flowed thick with the water and I howled and howled until someone knocked on the door to check if I was OK. I had never been less OK. Still crying, I wandered back to my room to change and found that I had no capacity whatsoever to make decisions or think rationally. Even my room felt different now. Only two weeks before Dad had been sat there in his wheelchair. There was the box of the new camera he had given me. There was the card he had written. There he was in a photo. I was silent now, numbed into shock, relying on other people to tell me what to do. I pulled on some clothes and then pushed the cereal that Roostie had made me around the plate, eating a single mouthful and staring into nowhere. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t anything any more. I was just a girl without a Dad.